(2017-03-22) Bad Call Center Advice The Vanguard Method

Bad call center advice - The Vanguard Method. Commerce Magazine published two short articles on solving call centre problems. They are repeated below with additional comments by John Seddon.

Call centres could become ‘hotbeds of dissent’

Call centres are becoming increasingly unionised and not simply because they are Other new factories’. The issues are not truly around pay but rather in the emotional reward that staff are receiving from their work and, consequently, in any feeling of partnership with their employers beyond the terms of their contracts.

The constant pressure to achieve a certain call rate leads to demotivation and real potential for stress

Call centre management under fire: Call centres should recruit ‘caring characters’ rather than red hot salespeople

Kaisen says too many people are recruited on the basis of characteristics associated with good sales performance – young, energetic and extroverted. But these are the very people who quickly become disillusioned with the job’s lack of face-to-face contact, limited variety, rigid performance requirements and poor promotional prospects

Kaisen also recommends testing potential recruits for their ability to ‘multi-task’ – a skill which they say is crucial for call centre employees yet rarely appears on interviewers’ lists of pre-requisites.

Traditionally, the best operators are made into team mangers, but this, too, is a mistake, according to Crump. Those who flourish as operators rarely make good team managers because they don’t want the responsibility or pressures of looking after a group,

Training should be holistic rather than deconstructed elements, said Crump.

Too much time is spent on product explanations, too little on so-called ‘soft skills such as customer service

It is the on-going management of call-centre staff and the environment within which they work that comes in for the most broad-reaching criticism, however, with technology, performance targets and quality control measures often proving more of a hindrance than a help.

There is a trend within call centres to measure activity such as the length of frequency of calls when really it is the output or end result that matters. Not only is this demoralising and dehumanising for staff, it’s also counterproductive

So what does Vanguard think of the consultant’s advice?

Hay McBer rightly identifies the cause of the problem as the way managers control the work but provides no alternative other than an implication to ‘soften’ or ‘balance’ such control.

Kaisen Consulting would encourage managers to re-think their recruitment policies. An astonishing finding when one considers the unreliability of recruitment tests. They also encourage managers to buy more ‘soft skills’ training

Soft skills training can add to cost and cause cynicism amongst staff.

neither offers a better management solution.

The problem with call centres is that they are designed on the principles of mass production. Decision-making is separated from work, managers make decisions on ‘production’ data, managers believe that the primary cause of variation in agent performance is the agents themselves. Both consultants’ reports exemplify the latter assumption.

The different and better assumption is that the primary cause of variation in agent performance is in the system – the way the work works. Failure to recognise the variation attributable to customers’ demands; failure to recognise how much demand on the call centre is caused by the organisation itself; failure to recognise how measures cause agents to use their ingenuity to beat the system, not contribute to it, are all features of a mass production design

When managers of call centres learn to manage their call centre as a system – managing demand (why customers call), value (what matters to customers) and flow (how and how well the system does the ‘value work’) – and the measures associated with this method are put in the hands of the people, morale improves along with performance. (cf failure demand)